D&D 3E/3.5 the 3e skill system

[tetrasodium]

Sure that is possible, but then it literally wouldn't be "an improvement in every way". If you fix all the problems, but you create new ones, then in the area you created new ones it is not an improvement.

No, the area you created problems can be a different one not present before

 

[Celebrim]

No, the area you created problems can be a different one not present before

And? I feel like there is a language barrier here or something.

 

[tetrasodium]

And? I feel like there is a language barrier here or something.

No you are just trying to split hairs excessively fine to defend 5e skills without actually doing so or are making an excessively pedantic argument to find confusion in something that was clear from the start

 

[Greenfield]

I liked the granularity of 3ed's skill system but it was needlessly complex. It added significant time to character creation and leveling up for little gain at the table. And it got messy when multiclassing.



As mentioned previously, 5E's skill system is an improvement over 3ed in every way. However, like many systems in 5E, goes just a bit too far towards simplification. I'd like to see more than just trained & untrained as it makes characters feel very similar in what they can do.

This recent thread (5E - Using different skills in 5e) was a good discussion on variant skill ideas.

I'll agree that 5e's skill system is different in pretty much every way. "Improvement" is a matter of opinion. I prefer the 3.* system because of the ability to focus training in particular areas as the character's level advances. That's slightly distinct from the "granularity" aspect, in that it's addressing adaptability.

In a system where skill concentrations are selected at character creation time and then adjusted sporadically (if at all), the player needs a certain amount of precognition, or be a really good guesser, with regards to making a good skill fit.

Progressive systems, like 3e, allow a character to learn and grow based on experience (not EXP but the things they've faced), and to change course on the fly.

Now that assesment is based on my 4e experience, and my slightly dated 5e experience, where the opportunities to train in skills was limited, and used Feats. If I'm off target, I apologize.

To illustrate the extreme case, consider the Ranger type who has skills trained in hunting/tracking/wilderness survival. You know, the usual Ranger stuff. Now you, the player, find that the campaign will focus almost exclusively on seafaring and swashbuckling, and travel to (large) exotic ports. As in, little or no wilderness.

Said Ranger is going to be a fish out of water (or whatever the opposite of that is) for the bulk of the campaign, and behind the curve for all of it. Essentially useless when it comes to applicable skills.

In a progressive system (one that goes beyond trained/untrained), the character can adjust to the unexpected campaign direction, and become useful again in relatively short order.

So in that sense, the trained/untrained approach is distinctly not an improvement on any level.

At least, in my experience and opinion.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'll agree that 5e's skill system is different in pretty much every way. "Improvement" is a matter of opinion. I prefer the 3.* system because of the ability to focus training in particular areas as the character's level advances. That's slightly distinct from the "granularity" aspect, in that it's addressing adaptability.

In a system where skill concentrations are selected at character creation time and then adjusted sporadically (if at all), the player needs a certain amount of precognition, or be a really good guesser, with regards to making a good skill fit.

Progressive systems, like 3e, allow a character to learn and grow based on experience (not EXP but the things they've faced), and to change course on the fly.

Now that assesment is based on my 4e experience, and my slightly dated 5e experience, where the opportunities to train in skills was limited, and used Feats. If I'm off target, I apologize.

To illustrate the extreme case, consider the Ranger type who has skills trained in hunting/tracking/wilderness survival. You know, the usual Ranger stuff. Now you, the player, find that the campaign will focus almost exclusively on seafaring and swashbuckling, and travel to (large) exotic ports. As in, little or no wilderness.

Said Ranger is going to be a fish out of water (or whatever the opposite of that is) for the bulk of the campaign, and behind the curve for all of it. Essentially useless when it comes to applicable skills.

In a progressive system (one that goes beyond trained/untrained), the character can adjust to the unexpected campaign direction, and become useful again in relatively short order.

So in that sense, the trained/untrained approach is distinctly not an improvement on any level.

At least, in my experience and opinion.

Not sure that it's a good selling point: that a big benefit to the 3.x skill system is that it can correct for a different failure in play. Your scenario should have been avoided before play even started.

 

[GlassJaw]

it has problems from a simulationist perspective.

Feature not a bug

 

[NotAYakk]

The reason why 5e is an improvement over 3e is because, in practice, 95% of the 3e skill system actually became "you max X skills, where X is determined by your class and int bonus, for which you gain a bonus equal to 3+level".

All of the "simulationist" detail of 3e evaporated under the pressure of the rest of the game mechanics.

This doesn't mean there couldn't be a simulationist system that is an improvement over 5e. Just that 3e isn't it.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

The reason why 5e is an improvement over 3e is because, in practice, 95% of the 3e skill system actually became "you max X skills, where X is determined by your class and int bonus, for which you gain a bonus equal to 3+level".

That doesn't match my experience. In the groups that I played in, there were lots of instances of skills being taken up to exactly 5 or 8 ranks, skills that got no more than one rank, and skills that got enough ranks to reliably reach a DC 20 or 25 check, and no higher.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

5e's skill system is not an improvement. its a mangled anemic mess.

 

[Celebrim]

That doesn't match my experience. In the groups that I played in, there were lots of instances of skills being taken up to exactly 5 or 8 ranks, skills that got no more than one rank, and skills that got enough ranks to reliably reach a DC 20 or 25 check, and no higher.

That matches my experience as well. There are actually relatively few skills that make sense to max out, and most of those involve opposed checks. And there is a tension between wanting to max out those skills and also wanting to get advantages from getting at least some skill in useful skills.

There were a ton of skills where having 5 ranks was really nice. And if you were like me, you threw a lot of little 'make skill check or be mildly debuffed/inconvenienced' problems at the players with a DC of between 5 and 10, that encouraged investing in skills or at the least rewarded builds that had them without overly punishing those that didn't.

There are some issues with how conservative the writers were in granting benefits to the player for being skilled, and with the skill system not being really integrated into the rest of 3e, and with spells granting skill way too easily in some cases. And the Profession skill is poorly thought out. And the Craft skill needs an improved crafting system to tie into. And there is a little bit too much elegance, which can be for example seen in kludging the 'Jump' into the system as a skill with a D20 skill check when jumps really don't work like that. And I think Pathfinder has a nice fix for one of the problems with cross class skills. And so forth. It's not perfect.

But the 5e system is such a big step backwards and so generally inferior to the 3e system in almost every way, that it's probably one of the biggest reasons I didn't adopt 5e. Bounded accuracy may work fine for simulating combat abstractly, but it's pretty lousy applied to a lot of other things. It's pretty clear that the 5e system isn't really intended to be a generic action resolution system, and that it's only intended to handle stunts performed under pressure, usually with binary pass/fail resolution only, and with comparatively little concrete guidance as to what is actually performed by an action or how hard it is to do it. And that's to not even get really into the problem that the system is so PC centric, that the DM is forced to just assume NPCs work by different rules. In other words, it assumes all the fun of the game is in the Combat/Challenge pillar (gamist aesthetics) and not so much in the Exploration pillar (simulationist aesthetics). And I like my tactical combat and tense action as much as the next guy, but I'd just play an isometric cRPG if that was all really got out of table top gaming.